


Visits

by atlas (cissysullivan)



Series: Season Gods [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, season gods
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-24
Updated: 2015-08-24
Packaged: 2018-04-16 23:50:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4644657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cissysullivan/pseuds/atlas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean comes to visit Sam at the end of the summer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Visits

It wasn’t that Sam dreaded Dean’s visits, it was that he never knew what to do when his older brother came over.  
  
When they’d been children that had never been the case. Sam had more fun with Dean than he did with anyone else. They would spend hours in the snow during the winter building armies of snowmen together. They would spend just as much time during the fall building the biggest pile of leaves they possibly could before jumping into it. Jess and Castiel couldn’t play with them. They were far too sensitive to the cold and so, in that time, Dean had been the person Sam spent most of his time with.  
  
But then they’d grown up. Their father had told them they needed to be ready to be the leaders of their respective kingdoms, and it was in the middle of their preparation that he died and left them to figure it all out on their own, and suddenly there wasn’t time anymore to spend time with Dean. Sam had an entire kingdom of snow and ice he had to oversee all on his own without the guidance of his father or the help of his mother.  
  
It had been Mary Winchester who had died and left the winter to Sam, but she’d been gone long since before he could remember, so her death had little to no effect on him. There were a few very warm winters before Sam was able to start casting winter on his own and, even then, he had the help of his father at the time.  
  
But now everything had changed.  
  
And he knew nothing would ever be the way it was again.  
  
Sam rushed around the house that morning, cleaning everything, though the house that they’d grown up in was already spotless. He paused briefly in his cleaning to stare out the window and watch the summer leaves flutter in the breeze.  
  
He closed his eyes.  
  
Summer was almost over. Finally.  
  
Opening his eyes, he walked from where he was straightening some picture frames on the coffee table near the door to the large window pressed into   
the side of the house. He could see the bench sitting pressed up against the side of the house, sitting on the porch. He would often sit out on the bench during the winter, wearing nothing except a pair of pants and a t-shirt, watching the snow fall slowly from the sky to the ground. Sometimes, if he was very quiet, he could hear the snow piling up on the ground.  
  
“Sam, you have to imagine the world as you would have it always if you want the winter to come as strong and hard and heavy as it did when your mother was alive,” John Winchester had told him when he was a child, trying to teach him how to use his power.  
  
For the first twelve years of his life, he hadn’t been able to do much of anything. The winters were very light. It was the reason that people thought global warming was a thing. The world was still suffering from the effects of Sam’s light winters. His father had told him it’d happened before and the world would always balance out. It would just take as many years as he’d been making bad winters before the good ones would start to make some difference.  
  
What John never knew was that Sam didn’t truly start making what he thought of as good winters until he was closer to eighteen. He was twenty-three now. He had another five years before the world even began to balance out again.  
  
The leaves outside fluttered in the breeze. The weather was nice today. A balmy seventy-five degrees, but there wasn’t any humidity. Sam imagined there were people outside enjoying the weather today, but he wouldn’t see them. The Winchester house was too far out into the country for Sam to really know or even see any of his neighbors. Even so, what they didn’t know and what no one knew yet was that the lack of humidity meant the last of summer’s hot days were over. All too soon, the wind would start having a bite to it and then they’d be trapped inside for most of the next nine months.  
  
Sam wouldn’t be. And living in Minnesota, there weren’t many other people he knew that were inside constantly either, but he knew in the states where there was a lot of sunshine, they’d start moving back inside until they saw the sun again.  
  
That was another thing that Dean and John had in common: they loved the sun. Sam, on the other hand, had only ever tolerated it.  
  
The doorbell rang and Sam jumped as he was pulled from his thoughts.  
  
Blinking owlishly, he saw that his older brother’s car was pulled up at the end of the street by the white picket fence that surrounded the property.  
  
Dean didn’t really need a car. When he wanted to visit, he could just think really hard about where he wanted to be and appear there. But for some strange reason, the older of the two Winchesters preferred to drive around. It had to have been a long drive. He lived in upstate New York and Sam lived in the outskirts of the Twin Cities.  
  
The doorbell rang again and this time Sam hung his head, closed his eyes, and sighed.  
  
Might as well get this meeting over with.  
  
The minute Sam opened the door, Dean grinned. It was still August, but he was wearing a gray sweater turtleneck and had a bottle of beer in one hand. Sam sighed, pressing his lips together as he pushed open the screen door so Dean could come in.  
  
“Sammy!” Dean half-shouted as he took a few steps forward, his arms outstretched.  
  
He wanted a hug Sam realized at the same moment he also realized something else: Dean was drunk. That was something Sam was noticing more and more with his older brother.  
  
Sam gave Dean a hug, able to note just how much like alcohol his brother smelled before he pushed away and held Sam out at arm’s length to look him up and down.  
  
“You’ve grown a lot since I last saw you, Sammy,” Dean commented.  
  
“I haven’t seen you since –”  _the funeral_  “– the beginning of the summer,” Sam replied, swallowing hard. “It’s not that long.” You could have visited earlier.  
  
Swallowing again, his lips still pressed together, Sam stepped away from Dean stiffly. His eyes flicked from his brother to the kitchen. He didn’t even try to force a smile as he said, “Want to come in? I have lots to drink.”  
  
It was mostly hot cocoa and some beers that he just happened to like. He didn’t have many if any hard liquors. That was, he knew, what Dean preferred.  
  
Suddenly he was angry at himself.  
  
Why hadn’t he shopped for more varieties of alcohol before Dean came over?  
  
As he was turning around and leading Dean from the entryway to the kitchen, he closed his eyes briefly again. This was why he didn’t like Dean coming over. He had a way of making him feel bad and inadequate without saying anything and only doing something he knew would upset him. Sam’s jaw clenched.  
  
“I’m good, Sammy, but thanks for offering,” Dean said.  
  
Sam could almost hear him grinning behind him. He didn’t turn around. He started pulling out a mug for cocoa for himself from the cupboard when he said without really meaning to, “What type of beer is that? I don’t recognize it.”  
  
“Pumpkin beer,” Dean said, holding it up to the light coming in from the kitchen windows. He had collapsed into a chair at the small table near the windows. His feet were on the table itself. He took another heavy swig from the beer bottle.  
  
Sam saw him out of the corner of his eye. His grip tightened on the cupboard as he swung it closed. He opened the other one and pulled out a packet of cocoa. He grabbed his tea kettle from the dish rack where it was drying and filled it with water. It was only when he’d put it on the stove for the water to boil that he finally turned around to see his brother. He watched him sitting at the table drinking without speaking.  
  
It wasn’t long before their father died that Dean had moved out.  
  
John had insisted on it. He said Dean needed to go somewhere that the King of Falling Leaves would be expected to live. New York was known for its spectacular autumns.  
  
Dean hadn’t wanted to move out at first. He was happy living in the Winchester house. But after Sam and John had a big fight when Sam wanted to go to college after high school, despite his responsibility as the Prince of Snow and Ice, John said Dean needed to move out too. He thought if he lived there, he would be thought of the king more quickly. Then John could retire and be thought of as the father of the king until he died of old age. After the death of Mary, he wasn’t interested in continuing to be the king. So shortly after Sam left the house, Dean did as well and that was where he’d been living ever since.  
  
But now John was dead and rather than having their father there to talk with them about the coming seasons and explain what they’d each have to do, they were there alone. And one of the two of them was drunk off of a bottle of cheap beer. Sam wondered how many beers Dean had already had that day.  
  
The tea kettle began to whistle.  
  
He took it off the stove, filled up his mug with steaming water, stirred in the cocoa and then went back to the table to sit beside his brother.  
  
“Dean, we have to talk about the Changing of the Seasons,” he said softly, his eyes on the tabletop rather than his brother’s face.  
Dean groaned. Sam’s eyes flicked upwards.  
  
“I know you don’t want to have this conversation now, but you know that’s why here and you know we need to talk about it,” he continued, his voice still soft. He paused before he added, “This is our first year doing this.”  
  
“No, it’s not,” Dean said, taking another swig of beer.  
  
Sam’s eyes narrowed. “Yes, it is,” he insisted. “This is our first year doing this.” He took a deep breath and swallowed hard. “Alone.”  
  
Dean paused for the briefest second, swallowing the last of the beer, but Sam saw it. Dean finished the beer and slammed it down on the table and then there were three whole minutes of complete and utter silence.  
  
“You know,” Dean said finally, his voice much softer than before, “when we both came back, shortly before he died, I wasn’t really surprised that you were mad at him like you always were. But now, looking back on it, now that he’s dead, I can’t believe you still yelled at him like that and he died only a few weeks later.”  
  
Sam’s eyes narrowed. “I didn’t know he was going to die,” he argued. “I was just coming back because you asked me to, because it was four years later and you finally had the guts to tell me that you missed me. I wasn’t going to let him still boss me around and tell me what to do and then not tell me why it was important.”  
  
“You never respected him,” Dean countered, his eyes still on the label of his beer bottle. “You just came back and started fighting with him like nothing changed. Yeah, you two hugged, but you started fighting only a few minutes later. It’d been four years since either one of us had seen or talked to you and not a damn thing had changed.”  
  
“I’m not the only one that didn’t change,” Sam said, raising his voice. He threw his arm out to one side as though gesturing towards the father that wasn’t there. “He could’ve changed, too, you know. I’m not the only one that had to change and make things better.”  
  
“He was too busy worrying about you to change!” Dean retorted, now turning to look at his brother, his voice increasing as well, his own arm thrown out to the side.  
  
“He never tried to understand!” Sam finally yelled.  
  
Dean sighed. “Tried to understand what, Sammy.” His eye went back to the beer label.  
  
“To understand what it’s like to be me.”  
  
Dean looked up again, but there was a crease of confusion between his brows.  
  
“What it’s like to be you?” Dean asked, sounding as confused as he looked.  
  
“Yes,” Sam said, as calmly as he could. “He never tried to understand what it’s like to be me. He never considered that, no matter what he asked me   
to do or when he refused to tell me anything. He conveniently forgot that I couldn’t touch anyone or I’d hurt them because I’m so cold, so he couldn’t know what it’d be like to keep things from me. It wasn’t like I was having things kept from me for my benefit, it felt like more secrets and my childhood was like that enough even before I gave Jess bad frostbite on her arm or killed the birds that landed in the trees during my seventh birthday party. He didn’t tell me things I needed to know and he never tried to understand.”  
  
Dean didn’t reply. His eyes had gone back to the beer label. He was smoothing it over again and again and again with his thumb.

Sam swallowed hard. Suddenly feeling foolish for his outburst.

“You know,” Dean said softly, still smoothing over the label with his thumb, “I don’t think you ever really understood what it was like to be Dad either. He was king of an entire kingdom. You never had to think about an entire kingdom. Dad did.”

Sam wanted to shout back that it didn’t matter, that Dean was wrong, that no matter what he said, John still never understood what it was like to only be able to touch people four days out of the year, but Dean’s words were so unexpected that his own got caught in his throat. 

Finally, Dean stood and said, “I’ll come back later.”  
  
Sam didn’t bother trying to stop him. He listened to Dean’s footsteps as he left the kitchen, put his shoes on in the entryway, paused to look at Sam, wondering if he was going to move and come say goodbye to him at all before he realized he wasn’t and then left the house closing the door behind him.  
  
Sam closed his eyes again as the door slammed closed.  
  
Summer was almost over. Thank god.


End file.
